Feeling Like a Pony Express Rider? Uh Oh, Here Comes the Telegraph

In a recent articled titled The
Impact of Technologies on Learning, researchers at the University of Washington
reported on substantive focus groups with more than 100 students and faculty
through a program called Listening to the Learner.

The results were what you might expect. Students clearly want to see faculty
make more use of pertinent technologies, and faculty meet up with a number of
barriers, such as lack of equipment, lack of rewards for the use of technology,
and culture shock-as one faculty member put it, feeling like a Pony Express
rider just as the telegraph comes along. The study recommends a reorganization
of technology support, but those recommendations don't affect IT managers much.
To tell you the truth, I think the study highlights, once again, academic departments'
lack of understanding of what their own mission might be, and the concomitant
lack of a departmental strategic plan.

The University of Washington study asked students about their desire for using
technology in coursework, and faculty about current approaches/barriers. The
results are grouped in several categories: Students Expectations of Technologies
in Course Work; Additional Technologies Students Use; Students' Preferred Instructional
Methods; Faculty Barriers to Integration of Technology; Integration of Educational
Technologies; Development of Educational Technologies; Organization of Technology
Support; and Faculty Training.

The authors conclude that their findings "illustrate a need for future
research investigating this discrepancy, aiming not only to listen to what university
and college communities expect of technologies but also to develop and implement
successful recommendations for technology adoption." If I were being particularly
cynical, that sounds like "Fund some more research," but it's also
reminiscent of what I hear frequently from campus facilities infrastructure
planners and designers.

Facilities planners and designers often bemoan the lack of understanding higher
education institutions often have about what it is they want to do with their
facilities-just like these authors seem to be asking what it is that institutions
want to do with their technologies. And, if I failed to mention it earlier,
these are not top-end technologies that the students, in particular, want to
see more use of. We're talking overhead projectors, spreadsheets, and the like;
stuff that can easily be seen as "infrastructure" without offending
anyone.

Rather than overall conclusions, however, you may be most interested in what
the authors recommend regarding reorganizing technology support. As might be
expected, they recommend 'better education"-meaning two things: (a) finding
ways to better inform faculty about what they have available and how to use
it, and (b) better informing students and faculty about the pre-existing programs
and resources that exist right now, but which many of them do not know about.

Their most interesting recommendations, however, are in a category they call
"Culture surrounding technology." Those are mostly intradepartmental
and have very much to do with the faculty. And these recommendations help emphasize
that some basic strategic/academic planning can help most departments with their
technology issues without really engaging the IT folks much at all. One of their
major findings is that teaching is "an isolating experience" and that
some intradepartmental tools can help overcome that. They recommend:

· Departmental Web sites: Better use of departmental Web sites for
communicating to faculty, including up-to-date concrete examples of how peers
in the department are using learning technologies;

· Personal profiles: Finding ways to help even the least savvy faculty
share their experiences with technology;

· Incentives: That same old bugaboo, faculty who spend a lot of time
on technologies don't get the kind of credit for it they need, for their own
motivation and for tenure

So, what is there to learn from this for the IT professionals on campus? Well,
maybe we have to be "outside consultants" and help the academics with
an age-old problem: The problem of connecting the mission of the institution
with the design and implementation of the institution's infrastructure is alive
and well. Without an academic plan for the institution, or for the department,
it's really hard to be sure that resources are being appropriately applied-whether
the resources are classroom space or network bandwidth.

Maybe it's time for IT folks to memorize a phrase and use it whenever they
are asked to create a new resource, purchase one, or support one: "How
d'es this fit in with your/our department's academic/strategic plan? What? You
don't have one? Well, we need you to have one so that we can make the best decisions
for you." That might not immediately change anything, but it's hard to
argue with.